Page 2 of Her Cruel Redemption (The Dark Reflection #3)

Chapter Two

M y fingers were curled, cramped from being clenched and straightened, tendons aching with the strength of my determination, manifesting as tension all through my arms and hands. I stared at those hands as a headache thudded behind my eyes, making my vision slightly blurry. But in the pulse between moments of pain, a tiny spark zinged into existence, crackling up the length of a finger and jumping to the next, vanishing with hardly a tickle against my skin. This would once have made me feel triumphant. But after weeks and weeks of paying for this tiny little zap with the thundering pain in my head and my muscles knotted with strain, my triumph was becoming a little careworn.

Across the shimmering water, Gwinellyn’s winged lizard lounged in a patch of sunlight, snapping at dragonflies and watching me with yellow eyes. He didn’t like me. Ever since I’d dismounted with a near unconscious Gwinellyn next to Baba Yaga’s hut, he’d made that very clear. Hissed at me when I got too close, sometimes tried to snap at me. But he always seemed to show up for watch duty when I practiced, like the crackle of magic between my fingers somehow alerted him and he flew from that forsaken chasm he dwelled in to sit in judgement.

That was fine by me. I was used to being judged. In my previous life as a maisera, then as a queen, and now, as an interloper in this valley full of mild-mannered Yoxvese who were always meticulously polite to me and as cold as the snowdrifts on some of the taller mountains in the Yawn. Welcome, Gwinellyn was so fond of repeating to me. I was welcome here among them, where they treated me like I had some sort of disease, giving me a wide berth, dipping out of conversations to avoid me, slamming down every question I asked so courteously that I wasn’t even given the privilege of justified anger in response.

Another thud of pain smacked the back of my eye. I groaned with frustration, momentarily consumed with leashed emotion, shaking out my hands as I took a few deep breaths. I could feel that prickle of static right there, just beneath my skin. So why couldn’t I make it do what I wanted? The fear that I would never be able to hissed away in the back of my mind, but I pushed it away. The smell of magic lingered in the air, smoky and acrid, and for a moment, in my exhaustion, my mind wandered down a path of association. Tousled dark hair. A blade falling to the floor. A pair of grey eyes. With a jolt of awareness, I suffocated the thought, clapping my hands together, rubbing my palms in circles until they were warm with friction and the staticky zing beneath my skin collected into two fine, hot points of pressure. I picked the knob of a gnarled old tree across the lake and flung my hands out before me. Lightning tore out of my hands, leaping across the water in jagged bursts, forking and striking two points on the ground with a rattling boom ! The lizard shrieked and jolted away, wings half flung, frills snapping out. He turned his head to eye the two smoking holes in the bank of the lake, then arched his neck to glare at me, flicking out a forked tongue.

‘I wasn’t aiming for you,’ I snapped. ‘If you don’t want to risk being struck, then go and sit somewhere else.’

He huffed, before sinking back down onto his belly in the warm sand, eyes still narrowed on me.

I sighed as I judged the distance between the gnarled tree I’d been aiming for and where the lightning had actually struck. It wasn’t even close. After all these weeks of sitting here, trying to master and direct tiny sparks and getting rewarded with a throbbing headache, I was getting no better at aiming the magic. It didn’t seem to matter whether I was wielding a lot or a little, I couldn’t bend it with any accuracy. But wielding a lot did give me a swooping sense of dizziness, like I felt now, my head spinning groggily as I hauled in some steadying breaths. But it felt good to throw a bolt like that and know I had that sort of power, even if it didn’t go where I wanted. It was more of a spectacle than chasing little zaps along my fingers.

The sun emerged from behind the clouds for a moment, crackling across the surface of the lake, almost the way the lightning had raced up my fingers moments earlier. I stared at it, thinking.

A cleared throat behind me drew my attention from the water. I closed my eyes as I waited for the approach of footsteps.

‘Rhiandra?’ It was Gwinellyn’s voice, of course. No one else would sneak up on me like that. ‘We’ve come to talk to you.’

We . Wonderful. I supposed that meant lover boy was being hauled up for execution. Remarkable what fluttering a pair of pretty eyes could achieve. When she came into my line of sight, my point was proven by Elias tagging along behind her, staring at the spot where the lightning had hit the bank with a grim frown.

‘Talk about what?’ I asked, suspicious of the beseeching look Gwinellyn shot him. It wasn’t like he would want to talk to me of his own accord. So far, the extent of our interactions had been one-word responses to direct questions. He also had an irritating tendency to place himself between me and Gwinellyn whenever we were in the same space together, like I was some kind of wild animal he needed to protect her from. He didn’t trust me. Whatever Gwinellyn had told him about the apple and what had happened at the palace, he clearly didn’t buy it. And judging by the dewy-eyed way he stared after her whenever she was within sight, he was ready to sacrifice himself to protect her from whatever wickedness he suspected I might stir up.

Elias held her gaze for a moment, before turning to me wearing an expression of resignation. ‘Actually, I’ve come to talk to you.’

Had he, now? Something like anticipation prickled my skin, possibly because he seemed so reluctant to have this conversation. And while that perhaps didn't bode well for me, I was itching for a break in the tense purgatory I was bound in. I gestured to the ground beside me. ‘Then let me offer you a seat.’

Gwinellyn looked between the two of us, chewing on her lip, like we were a couple of dogs she was trying to keep from fighting. She was growing fond of trying to manage my interactions with everyone, and I thought she would sit herself down as well so she could intervene when I inevitably said something she deemed was too offensive. But to my surprise, she made no move to approach.

‘I’ll leave you to it,’ she said instead. Elias sat on the grass beside me and together we watched Gwinellyn tread the banks of the lake, towards an eager Valoric—the name she’d given the winged lizard. A wyvern, she’d told me numerous times. But he looked like a giant lizard to me. He stretched out his neck and pressed a nose into her palm, eyes fluttering closed as she ran that hand up his head, drew in close to his neck. It would never fail to baffle me, seeing her with that creature. I could still hardly comprehend the fact that she’d touched down in the middle of the palace on it, alone and completely vulnerable to the dangers lurking within the walls. A shiver crawled down my spine as I thought of the specifics of those dangers, of who had been waiting for her within the walls, but I violently severed the reflection, smothered it, turning my attention to Elias’s presence beside me with some difficulty.

‘Have you come to turn me out?’ I asked. I’d been waiting for that moment. Waiting for them to tell me I was no longer so welcome .

‘I wish I had,’ Elias replied, surprising me enough to make me turn more fully towards him. ‘But it’s not that simple, is it? You’ve convinced Gwin to care for you, and I care for her, so I can’t.’

So, we were going to have a real conversation after all. Some of my tension sighed away in relief. I’d readily take the plain speaking, even if it came with hostility. I was so sick and tired of cold courtesy. ‘I could be just as wary of you.’

Confusion deepened his frown. ‘Wary of me?’

‘Yes. Because she is young and beautiful and innocent to the ways of men. I doubt I can trust you to keep your hands off her.’ I enjoyed the way his jaw tightened as he shifted in his seat, enjoyed the way it meant I’d aimed the needle in precisely the right spot.

‘I’m not going to hurt her.’

‘But I don’t know that, do I?’

‘You don’t need to,’ he said. ‘You’ve hurt her yourself. You’ve given up the right to claim you’re watching out for her.’ He turned his gaze back to Gwinellyn. ‘I’m not here to debate that with you, though. Gwin asked me to help you, so I’m going to try.’

Suddenly, I was alert and eager, sitting up straighter and leaning forwards. ‘You’re going to teach me to use magic?’

‘No.’ The word came out sharp. Instant. Like a slap, and I reacted to it with a glower. ‘You know I can’t do that.’

‘I know you won’t do that,’ I snapped, sinking back down into a slouch. ‘But I don’t for a moment think you can’t. ’ He was quiet for a long time, and across the lake, Gwinellyn was examining one of Valoric’s huge, clawed feet, running her hands between his toes like she was looking for thorns while he nuzzled at the back of her neck. Baffling. Her relationship with the creature was baffling.

‘I’d like to explain, and then maybe you’ll understand why I won’t. Why none of us will,’ he continued, his voice softer. ‘I suppose I think you deserve that much.’

‘Go ahead, then. Explain to me why you think it's right to keep me ignorant about something that lives in my own body.’

He released a pent-up breath. Like my request was really that trying. ‘Will you at least hear to what I have to say?’

I supposed that was a request to shut my mouth and keep my bitterness to myself. ‘I’m listening.’

‘How much do you know about how humanity came to these lands?’

Well, little other than what Grand Weaver Dovegni had told me. My mind flickered back to the conversation we’d had after he’d kidnapped me off the streets. I remembered the way he’d stroked the black box, remembered the deal he’d offered me, remembered how conflicted and nauseated I’d felt at the idea of him capturing—

I slammed down on the end of the thought, choked it until it stopped twitching. Buried it in the graveyard of other such thoughts.

‘Only a little,’ I said.

‘We—the Yoxvese, I mean—lived beyond the Living Valley then. So did many others who are no longer around today. When humans first reached the shores of this land, my ancestors embraced them. For a time, we were friends.’

Hard to imagine when we called them fall spawn and hunted them for their blood now, but Dovegni had told me the land had once been populated by fall spawn when he was explaining what that black box he’d held would do, explaining how with a jolt of electricity he could sever their magic from their control. A chill breeze swept in, ruffling the water, bending the grasses on the bank and blowing a puff of dandelion into the air to swirl up and away.

‘Then came a harsh winter, followed by a dry summer. The early human settlers didn’t understand the land they’d come to well enough and they couldn’t grow their food. They were starving. The Elders of those times decided to help their friends by gifting some of their number with magic.’

‘The way Baba Yaga gifted hers to me?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘The magic now buried in you is one of the last vestiges of that time, a gift passed down through generations long after we realized that magic should never have been given to humanity in the first place.’

‘I already know what you’re going to tell me next,’ I cut in before he could continue. ‘That it reacts poorly with human blood and it’s dangerous and unpredictable.’ It was what I’d already been told every other time I’d asked to be taught, but it all sounded like fear and envy as far as I was concerned. I didn’t see any of the Yoxvese wielding abilities as devastating as mine. They could coax plants into blooming and read each other’s emotions and perform other similarly harmless tricks. But wielding lightning was a far cry from all that. And Elias was one of the last of them who would trust me with any sort of power, so of course he was going to tow this line of argument.

‘Not only that. It can drive you mad.’

When I tore my gaze away from the lake to look at him, it was to find him staring at me intently, his expression tense.

‘It’s why we had to stop gifting it,’ he continued. ‘In most of those early humans, the magic ate away at their sanity, turning them violent and dangerous. But the human settlers thought we were just hoarding magic to ourselves and they began hunting any race who bonded it, finding other ways to access it without gifting.’

Like shocking them and binding them and trapping them in dungeons for blood harvest. Those were all things I had witnessed myself. A cord winding, cutting, binding. Red welts on swarthy skin as I tied a ripped piece of my skirt around his arm—

I strangled the end of this thought as well. Buried it next to the others.

‘Baba Yaga wasn’t mad,’ I said, adjusting my focus. Though, I didn’t really know if that was true or not. She’d often seemed at least half mad. But it suited my argument to say it.

‘No. But she did know how dangerous magic could be. That’s why she was living in the mountains, dedicating herself to keeping humans out, as have those who held her gift before her.’

‘And that’s what you expect me to do now, is it? You want me to move into that little hut and become a scarecrow who chases away the binders and the snatchers?’

‘No. I—we—want you to give up the gift.’

I was stupid enough to be dumbstruck. ‘ What?’

‘Baba Yaga should never have gifted it to you in the first place. You’re too unstable. If anyone was ever going to be driven mad from magic, it’s you.’

Well, at least I could appreciate the plain speaking. But I was already shaking my head, my temper rising, making my headache throb even harder. ‘No. The answer is no.’

‘It’s for—’

‘I don’t care about your reasons,’ I snapped, climbing to my feet now. I wasn't going to stay and listen to this. The magic had been given to me. I hadn’t stolen it. It was mine. ‘I don’t care if you want to package them as a warning or as concern for my sanity or whatever you can think of to manipulate me. If you dare try to take it from me—’

‘We would never force it from you. It’s forbidden,’ he said firmly. ‘You’d have to choose to give it up.’

That calmed me a little. Enough to take a breath. ‘If that’s all you’ve come to talk to me about…’ I pressed a palm to my forehead, closing my eyes for a moment against the throbbing pain there. It pulsed behind my eyelids, a bloated, sluggish thing inside my skull. ‘I think we’re done here.’

‘I could tell you about Draven, too.’

Immediately, my eyes shot open, my stomach flipping at the sound of that name I’d banned myself from using. The graveyard in my mind quivered, like all those thoughts were turning over, not quite smothered after all. Elias’s brows were raised expectantly as he looked up at me. Like he was baiting me, offering me something he knew I couldn’t refuse.

‘I haven’t asked about him,’ I hissed through gritted teeth. I had been very, very careful not to ask about him, had guarded against my curiosity with an iron will and uncompromising boundaries. There were rules to my life, now. I didn't talk about him . Didn't ask about him . Didn't think about him . Pretended there was no him . Until I could control that arc of lightning and wield it against him, it would stay that way.

'No,’ Elias replied. ‘You haven’t. Not once.’

I stared him down, heart thudding in my ears, sick with anticipation, hating that he had somehow seen through my thin pretence. I hadn’t teased out the connection between the Yoxvese and him . I hadn’t gone looking for information. But how was I supposed to resist when it was being so readily handed to me?

'Tell me what exactly?' I said finally as that iron will corroded.

'Enough to make you realise what danger you're playing with by holding onto the magic.'

I swallowed, pushing the awareness of my headache to the side, slowly sinking back down onto the ground. I turned my gaze back to the water, as though that would be enough to hide my sudden eagerness. Gwinellyn was watching us on the opposite bank, her expression pinched with worry. I shot her a quick smile to keep her from coming over here in some attempt to intervene.

'I'll listen to whatever it is you have to say. But I'm not going to change my mind,' I warned, half hoping he’d give up the conversation and leave my buried thoughts alone. Half scared he would, since they were going to rise now no matter what I did.

'You know we call him Koschei,' he began.

'Yes.' Baba Yaga had called him the same. And I'd heard the name whispered among the Yoxvese a handful of times, hissing away like a tap that was turned off tight as soon as anyone realised I was listening. A violation of those iron-willed rules I could never resist.

'It's a name we gave him after he was exiled from the Living Valley.'

'Exiled?'

'Forbidden from returning.'

'Yes, I know what exiled means.'

I heard him shifting in his seat, heard the angry little huff. 'I have no idea how you've managed to convince Gwin to love you,' he muttered. 'I'll try and start at the beginning, but you need to be civil to me. Whatever he did to you at the palace, it had nothing to do with any of us. I don't deserve your resentment.'

'Alright,' I conceded. I didn't want him to stop talking now. 'Sorry.' I jigged my knee as I waited for him to start speaking again, trying to bite down on the spill of questions I was barely holding back.

‘I didn’t know him well personally,’ he began. ‘But his arrival here was a shock. We hadn’t seen a magic-bonded human beyond Baba Yaga for a long time.’

‘So, he is human?’ I kept my face turned away to hide the hunger I was sure I had scribbled all over it.

‘Half.’

‘Half?’

‘Half Yoxvese. At least, we think he is.’

I was staring so intently at a pebble on the bank of the lake that it began to blur. He was half human? And half… one of them? That didn’t seem possible. Draven was nothing like the people in the Living Valley. He was ruthless. Cunning. Unpredictable. The Yoxvese were a bunch of incomprehensibly serene peace lovers who didn’t even believe in eating meat. He couldn’t possibly share any characteristics with them. ‘How could that happen?’

‘There have been those who’ve left, who’ve wanted to take a chance on seeing the world beyond the mountains. None have ever come back, though. So, we weren’t prepared for a human half-breed with magic in his blood to find his way through the cavern system to ask us for help.’

‘What sort of help?’

‘The same sort of help you’re asking for now.’

The words landed like a blow. I flinched. Took a moment to recover. ‘That doesn’t mean I’m anything like him.’

‘No, unless you do nothing to keep his story from becoming your story.’

‘If this is just going to be some sort of cautionary tale to scare me into compliance, then you’re wasting your time.’ I said it as though I wouldn’t have hunted him down later for the rest of the story, as if the thoughts in my graveyard weren’t scratching at their coffins, sticking bony fingers out of the soil atop their graves, hungry and restless, stirring questions I refused to ask. I didn’t need to ask questions. I didn’t need to know about Draven’s life here. I didn’t need to know whether he’d been as much an outsider among them as I was.

‘It’s a cautionary tale in part. But I also think you deserve to know. After what he did to you…’ I glanced at his face, surprised by the softening of his tone. ‘Whatever you’ve done to Gwin, I don’t think anyone deserves to be compelled, or have their mind meddled with. If you want to understand it, then I want to help you do that.’

I studied him, repulsed by that pity in his expression. Or perhaps I was repulsed by the reminder of the muddled story I’d given Gwinellyn, a story of being enchanted and controlled by the man now wearing the crown she should have inherited. It hadn’t been a lie, not entirely.

Tell yourself that. Does it make it easier to swallow?

I grit my teeth against the remembered words and tried to pummel them back into the ground before they could raise any other memories. I was not going there. I could have a conversation about him without needing to think about that.

‘So, did you ask him to give up his magic the way you’re asking me to?’ I asked finally.

‘Yes.’

‘And he didn’t take the suggestion well.’

‘No. But even though we refused to teach him to use magic, we let him live among us for a time, learn our way of life, since it was his birthright in a sense. I think the Elders always hoped he would come to trust us and change his mind about giving the magic up.’

‘But he didn’t.’ In a flash, I could see him before me, the image sharp and clear. Dark hair dishevelled, a half-smile cocked on his arrogant mouth, pewter eyes intently fixed on me. I could even imagine what he would say, could just about hear that burnt-toffee voice running over my skin in a way that made my hair stand on end. Would you have changed your mind, my dear?

I pressed the heels of my palms to my eyes as though I could block him out, even though he was an image in my head. I wished I could rip him out like a splinter, wished these memories would stay dead. Talking about him was a clear transgression of those rules I’d set myself, and now here I was, already spiralling.

‘Are you alright?’ Elias’s voice cut into the swirl of my thoughts, and I yanked myself back into the present, opened my eyes. I was sitting by a lake on the dirt. The wind was cool against my skin. There was an enormous winged lizard watching me. I was here . Not there. ‘We don’t have to keep talking about this if it’s too much for you.’

‘No,’ I said immediately, too eagerly. ‘I’m fine. How long did he live here?’

‘Not long. But it was long enough to spread some ideas. Violence has never been a part of our way of life here. We can defend ourselves well enough, and the wyvern riders have always been granted permission to use force in protecting the Living Valley, but when humanity began to spread, we didn’t wage a war, only retreated. If we’d done anything differently, it would have meant a complete betrayal of all the values our society is built upon, and we wouldn’t let the human expansion turn us into something we weren’t.’ There was a note of pride in his voice as he said this, but then he went quiet for a long pause.

‘But Draven is convincing,’ I finally added, caressing that illicit name in my mouth with a thrill of familiarity. It had been months since I’d said it. Months since I’d sighed it, whimpered it. Stop , I told myself. Focus. I turned the tide of my thoughts and began to collect the story around me, feeling the throb of what Elias wasn’t saying beneath his words. I had seen the dungeons of Misarnee Keep, knew what the druthi did to the fall spawn brought in by the binders who took their captives from this very mountain range. There was only so much that values of peacefulness could do in the face of loved ones being locked away in cells to have the blood squeezed out of their veins.

‘He found an existing wound and he widened it,’ Elias said, his voice softer now. Sad. ‘There were some who weren’t so content to just hide here waiting for binders to pick us off. There was a lot of anger that the Elders were pretending wasn’t there. When his talk of war and vengeance grew too loud, he was thrown out of the Living Valley. From what we know now, I think he went to Baba Yaga after that and lived with her for a time while she taught him how to control his magic. Eventually, a number of our community followed him. They are renegades, forbidden from ever returning here and bringing their hatred and their anger back where it could spread to others. But the discontent has been a difficult thing to put back in its box. Every few weeks, there's a tale of someone new running off to join them.’

‘I’m not surprised,’ I muttered. And then—because surely, I could ask at least one question—said, ‘Where did he come from before he came to you?’

‘I don’t know. All he ever told us was that the magic was gifted by his mother. The rest of his history he kept to himself.’

‘Of course. Aether forbid he ever share anything about himself with anyone,’ I said, more to myself as my mind whirled, slotting new information with old. Glancing at Elias, I opened my mouth to ask another question, but it fizzled on my tongue. Because he was giving me a strange look, and I scrambled to rearrange my facial features, to wipe whatever eager gleam had been dancing in my eyes and hide behind a mask of apathy. The only things I needed to know about Draven were those that might help me conquer him. ‘Is that all you wanted to talk to me about?’ I said, affecting disinterest.

Elias studied me for a moment longer, and I wondered if he’d try to read me with his magic. But he only moved his gaze over my shoulder, the softening of his expression letting me know Gwinellyn was on her way back to us.

‘Magic will hurt you,’ he said, briefly returning his focus to me. ‘We don’t refuse to teach you to be cruel. We do so because we know the damage it’ll do. I hope you’ll at least consider that.’ He rose to his feet, going to Gwinellyn, taking her by the hand and leading her away. She glanced at me hopefully, but let herself be led, and I was left alone with my thoughts again.

No doubt Elias had hoped to leave me questioning the wisdom of holding onto the magic, but I hardly even thought about that. I wasn’t going to go mad . And even if I did go a little mad, if I only went as mad as Baba Yaga, then it didn’t worry me. The old witch had been mercurial and said some odd things, but she hadn’t been in any sort of state that I’d be terrified of finding myself in. No, the part of the conversation I focused on was what I’d learned about Draven. Knowing he’d been here in the Living Valley made me jittery, nervous. Because surely, he would eventually come looking for me here. It was all the more reason to master my magic quickly. Groaning, I massaged my temples, my headache returning to my focal awareness. But even if I needed to do it quickly, I wasn’t likely to do it today. I’d had enough for one day.

I wasn’t staying in that rabbit warren of a home Gwinellyn shared with her other Yoxvese friends. There hadn’t been room, and frankly, I didn’t feel like marinating in their distrust. Nor was I in one of the strange houses the Yoxvese sung out of trees. They had instead found me another little hovel a distance away, scraped out of the limestone cliff face, that had been empty for some time. Mae and Tanathil—the two of Gwinellyn's friends who'd been the warmest to me—had cleaned it up and made some adjustments. But as I stepped through the doorway and gazed around at the hewn rock walls, the little bed in the corner, the single chair and table, there was little that I could do to prevent myself from seeing it as it was—a hole in the ground.

Dark-leafed vines clung to the ceiling, dangling low enough to touch my head in places and occasionally dripping condensation onto me while I slept. I’d ripped them out over and over again, but they just kept coming back, growing unnaturally fast and spreading with a vengeful determination that seemed almost sentient. It probably was. None of the plant life here behaved the way it should.

My evening consisted of nibbling unenthusiastically at one of the densely-seeded loaves that passed for bread here while I tried not to long for the luxuries of the palace, for potatoes cooked in duck fat and quail stuffed with apricots and red wine and chocolate and a bath tub that wasn’t a pool of tepid water in a cave nearby shared with anyone else who cared to use it. I tried not to long for Leela, for her easy company and her unwavering support, wondering again what had happened to her, where she was, whether she was okay, picking at questions I had no way of finding answers to.

It was better to stay up as late as I could, to wait until I was exhausted before crawling into the lumpy bed, but I hated sitting in the glow of those heinous wishlights that darted around among the vines, and there was only so much I could do to keep myself occupied in this little hovel. Eventually, I crawled into bed, closed my eyes and waited.

All those memory corpses trembled, turned, clawed their way into my conscious mind, revealing themselves not as rotting frames but whole and gleaming and powerful. I remembered . I remembered lips on my neck, on my breasts, between my legs, remembered the salty taste of skin and the heady thrill of wrapping my thighs around him. I remembered being chased, being caught, being held. And being watched, always being watched, by eyes that saw far too much of me and still seemed to always want more. I remembered until I was flushed and aching and the emptiness between my legs became unbearable. And when I finally slipped a hand down to quench this unendurable hunger, I banished the memories in favour of an invention. I imagined him on his knees before me. I imagined him pleading to serve me. I imagined making him suffer. I imagined making him beg. I climaxed with a gasp, and the relief was immediately followed by a wave of rage-coated shame. How could I hate Draven so much and still do… this?

As I stared at the violet-washed vines above my bed, I swore my nightly vow. That I’d make Draven pay for what he’d done to me. That as soon as I could control my magic, I would hunt him down and settle the score.